The embodiments disclosed herein are directed generally to print management, and more specifically to the creation and/or use of production tickets in managing high volume printing operations.
Commercial print shops often have different computerized systems for handling different parts of the ordering and printing processes. Typically, a Management Information System (MIS) contains information on books or other publications that are available to be ordered. An Order Management System enables a particular book to be ordered. A Production Management System receives and schedules orders for printing and/or pick-up of existing inventory. A Fulfillment system handles the printing and packaging process. Some print shops track orders as they move through the various systems using hand written production tickets, or production tickets that are partially printed by the ordering system and then completed by hand. The use of production tickets is beneficial to the fundamental task of completing prepress and production operations on an order that is received. Prepress operations include color management, font checking, image resolution checking, imposition, soft proofing, e-mail notification, job ticketing, file conversion etc. and may include submission to a printing system or archiving in a repository.
Various methods have been developed for computer-generating job tickets in a printing environment. As is described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,965,445, assigned to Xerox Corporation, computerized job tickets are used to direct an imaging system to produce a designated number of a particular document or set of documents in a particular format or style, such as, for example, simplex (single-sided) or duplex (double-sided), and/or with designated image processing procedures applied to the document. Accordingly, a document is created as specified in the job ticket associated with the document. U.S. Pat. No. 6,965,445 describes the use of individual job tickets for printers, copiers or imaging devices. The individual printing, copying or imaging parameters may be varied or manipulated by changing the parameters on any job ticket. The '445 patent discloses the combination of a job ticket with a document file containing, within its file name, user-supplied parameters such as the desired number of copies and percent magnification/reduction. The system described in the '445 patent enables a single pre-configured job ticket to be customized for use in combination with many different document files.
It would be useful to develop an improved system and method of automatically preparing production tickets using information from several different computer systems.